Philosopher Seneca the Younger said “One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood.” This sentiment certainly reflects the heartening safety we covet in companions, choosing friends based on how right they make us feel. No two people agree constantly, though, and it is rarer still that consensus can be reached within a group.
I keep a fairly close circle of friends. While I see the world through a lens that doesn’t recognize the notion of strangers, there are only about five people I wholeheartedly trust, one of those people being my mother. Like I said: close circle.
Our differences are what make us compatible, my friends and I. When one of us (typically me) is overwhelmed with anxiety, there is usually one of us overcome with indifference that can be met in the middle. In times of anguish, there is joy to be shared among us. Nobody gets left behind. We push, pull and drag each other through the tribulations of our markedly dissimilar lives.
It is support I have come to count on, despite deliberate, even visceral resistance. Autonomy is crucial to my self-image, but I let these few remarkable individuals share my life’s burden. They are the stilts beneath the beach house, keeping me above water as we all collectively sway with the escalating wind.
When one of those supports weakens, everything tilts to a sickening angle, knocking even the most poised and balanced people to their knees.
To be understood by a friend is to be not only recognized for who you are, but appreciated for how you became that person, why you continue to be that version of yourself. Gaps in understanding are inevitable as empathy fails to accommodate the limitations of perspective. We can only hope that our friends will take the time to try to understand.
Being recognized for you who you are, yet remaining conceptually isolated, is to be judged, scrutinized and dissected. Being picked apart in this way by the few that earned the title of “true friend” per Seneca the Younger’s definition is emotionally crippling. It is having your legs swept from beneath you, the air sharply vacating your lungs as you collide with the jagged surface that so closely resembles rock bottom.
It is being misunderstood. It is being alone in a crowd of familiar faces.
The people who regularly understand you best hold the greatest power to make you question your own self-awareness, your own worth when they are unable to comprehend something about you. It only takes one friend’s judgement, one’s misunderstanding, to inspire distrust regarding the safety you should feel among the entire collective.
In scrutinizing your lifestyle, they cast doubt on what you believe to be great about yourself. They fray the strongest stiches in the fabric of your esteem, rendering you vulnerable to complete unravel. It is a requisite of friendship to reinforce the tears, rather than create them. We can overlap the flaws we see in others with understanding instead of leaving each other torn and vulnerable.
Disagree as you wish. Follow your independently derived moral compass to the fulfillment of your aspirations. Do not, however, ostracize your most loyal friends by imposing your ill-fitting values upon them. Do not incriminate those who differ from you when it was that incongruence for which you loved them in the first place.
True friends should be more than the stepping stool used to mount your high horse.